Adhoc Studios still aren’t sure whether they’ll make a second season of Dispatch, their startlingly popular Telltale-style superhero comedy adventure, but they’re thinking about it very “seriously”. In brief, they’re not confident they can bottle the lightning twice, especially if they want to release another season before 2032.

Dispatch’s first season took seven years to develop, thanks partly to being dropped by its publisher part-way through. Discussing that tortured development in a just-published interview with Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese, game director Nick Herman says there were “zero expectations for Season 1 – external expectations. People just had to show up and enjoy it and not have a bunch of theories and stuff in their head.”

The same won’t be true next time round, of course, and the developers are already finding the enthusiasm for a follow-up a bit daunting. “People are mad that we haven’t told them what we’re doing,” Herman told EG. “It’s the new problem, right? It’s like, are you doing it? Are you not doing it? We’re days away from really sitting down and having the time – because we’ve had to support the game – where we’re going to really sit down and lay those plans out.”

In the same retrospective natter, lead writer Pierre Shorette drew a parallel with music, commenting that “you have your whole life to write your first album and then eight months to write your second. And there’s a little bit of that feeling.”

“We had so long with this – seven years is a lot of time,” he went on. “If anything, it would have been embarrassing if it was bad. I mean, you took fucking long enough! We’re taking GTA 6 amounts of time on this shit, you know – it better be good. I know we’re not going to have that amount of time for Season 2 because we want to meet the demand.”

I would play another season of Dispatch, though I’d like a change of protagonist. That said, I also couldn’t fault Adhoc for hanging up their capes, retiring their mystic amulets and trying something new. Seven years is a long time to spend thinking about the likes of Waterboy.